Our presentation relates to a project funded by the German Research Foundation (1998-2004; Meyer/Kunze/Trautmann 2007). Its aim was to find out about subjective theories, processes and obstacles of student participation – a key notion in German didactics – in several domains in German classrooms. For this purpose, we interviewed teachers, recorded and analysed selected teaching sequences and asked sixth-form students about their perspective on the teaching and learning process. The aim of this qualitative study was to present case studies and to identify types of participation. By way of presenting one example from the German foreign language classroom – the learning game of discussing the notion of ‘German culture’ – , we will ask what categories and tools were used in our study to analyze the didactic process, and then compare them with notions of the joint action theory developed by Sensevy, especially the milieu and the didactic contract. It will emerge that the joint action of teacher and student(s) is here characterized by an ambivalent combination of cooperation and conflict, thus leading to the question if the joint action theory takes aspects of power and coercion into account.